Threatcon Delta

by Andrew Britton

  “I wouldn’t put anything past them,” Phair admitted. “The man who captured us obviously has allies—and there was that comment about enemy combatants.”

  “I know,” Adjo said. “He’s expecting a shoot-out of some kind.”

  “With—?”

  “The MFO,” Adjo said. “They’re going to come in at some point.”

  “He seemed certain they’d kill us,” Phair said. “Why? As you said, we’re tied up, and it’s not like they’d bomb the monastery.”

  “I don’t know the answer to that, either,” Adjo said.

  The young Egyptian resumed his struggles with added fervor. He felt anxious, angry, wanting to be out of here and beating that man’s head in with a rock—whoever he was. It enraged him that he couldn’t place the voice. The Egyptian was also annoyed with himself. He had knocked around this place for days, finding information but not the right kind, not enough, not in time. He was a border patrol officer, not a spy. He shouldn’t have been the one doing this, certainly not alone. Samra should have sent additional resources, the MFO be damned.

  We should have moved in the very first night, when the group of pilgrims was in the cave. But then you would have been no different than the theocracies that surround you, he told himself. It was as important to retain that neutrality as it was to uphold their sovereign borders.

  Adjo could feel his flesh tear and his wrists grow bloody, but the chair was solid. The struts in the back were not going to move. Perhaps if he threw himself over, the chair would come apart.

  That was when he heard something that made him wonder if maybe the Christian world did have God a little bit on their side.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  JEBEL MUSA, SINAI PENINSULA

  As they walked toward the monastery, Carla Montilla did not know what she was doing even though she knew why she was doing it. Her life had never been all purpose and no plan. Because she had well-to-do and well-connected parents to help her, progress was inevitable. The goals varied, but never the pace. She moved quickly, decisively. Even when Carla hiked or bicycled, she knew where she was going and how long it would take.

  This escapade was madness. It was an adventure when it started, like an amusement park ride. But it turned out there was no track, no car, and no one at the controls. She was going forward without support, without a specific plan, and without an actual goal once the place was achieved. She now found it stupid rather than exciting, and felt even worse because her grandfather was involved. It was likely that he would have come without her in any case, but he was a man of passion rather than good sense. She should be providing that.

  As they moved through the darkness on uneven stones and gullied ground, Carla also wasn’t convinced that what they were doing was worth the risk. From listening to dinner-table talk as a child, she knew there were always revolutions and mob gatherings in the third world. To try and stop them was like trying to stop the wind. It blew here and there and was part of the nature of things.

  And yet.

  There was something contagious about Kealey’s determination. His question to her as she left, about the Staff, was as sincere as any he’d uttered. It made her want to help. He seemed to want to do the right thing, even when he did not approve of the people who stood by his shoulder.

  That was the only thing that kept her going on the path to the monastery to wait for Phair and the Egyptian.

  The wait was not a long one. As they neared, she heard a commotion by the front gate. Leaving her grandfather resting on a flat boulder, she eased around the intervening slope, a grassy affair that started some fifty meters above her. She felt like a fox stalking its prey, and that gave her a little thrill, perhaps because she didn’t feel a real sense of danger.

  She stopped and looked and saw men leaving the compound. They shut the door and walked toward a van that was just pulling up from the MFO position down the long, winding road.

  Two of the men were standing in the headlights, looking down at cell phones. They were punching buttons and listening. A moment later the phone on Carla’s belt vibrated. She looked at the number. The caller ID read “Cell Two.”

  That was Phair’s designation. She hesitated. It stopped buzzing. An instant after that the phone hummed again. She glanced at the lighted faceplate. The caller ID read “Cell Three.” That was the Egyptian’s designation.

  She slid behind the slope and immediately called Kealey’s programmed number. He picked up.

  “What is it, Carla?”

  “Did you receive a call from Phair or Adjo?” she asked quickly.

  “No,” he replied. “Wait—Phair is calling now.”

  “It’s not him!” she whispered loudly.

  “Are you sure? He sent me something less than ten minutes ago.”

  “I see men at the gate of the monastery,” Carla said. “Some are putting wounded men inside a van—several monks, it looks like. Others are using phones, probably the ones you gave Phair and Adjo. I think they’re trying to find out who else is here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the southern side of the monastery.”

  “Were you able to see anything else?”

  “There were five men leaving the compound through a door beside the main gate. They were behind the headlights so I couldn’t tell what they were wearing.”

  “Can you get to the MFO position down the road without anyone from the van seeing you?”

  She looked in that direction. It was the same way they had first approached the mountain when they arrived. “I think so.”

  “Go,” Kealey urged. “If something has gone wrong inside, you and your grandfather need to get to safety.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I still need to find out why the helicopters are here,” he said. “Then I’ll join you. And Carla?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for the heads-up. You did great.”

  She replaced the phone, feeling surprisingly proud. She hadn’t realized she’d come to respect Kealey’s opinion so much.

  She returned to her grandfather. “We have to go,” she told him.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Where could the Staff have gone? Surely the events must be related.”

  He was oblivious to anything but the artifact. In a way, she envied him that.

  “We can figure that out later,” she said.

  He nodded surrender, not agreement, as he rose and walked off with her. It had only been two days but she was exhausted. She couldn’t imagine how tired her grandfather was.

  It was just two hundred meters to the checkpoint. It would be good to get this responsibility off her shoulders, sit down, and be an observer to however it all worked out.

  Of course, she told herself as they moved furtively along the slope toward the southern side of the road, so far absolutely nothing has gone as planned. . . .

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

  Jonathan Harper sat in his chair in the Underground. With their track record on this operation dragging, he was gratified that one part of the puzzle may have been solved. And while there wasn’t time to waste, Harper wanted to be sure about the interpretation before he phoned Kealey. The ramifications of what he suspected could be severe.

  The deputy director had summoned photo expert Paul Schuyler, psychiatrist Gail Platte, and CIA intelligence analyst George Nesmith to an urgent meeting in the ironically named conference room in the heart of the building. The windowless, oval chamber sat within a web of electronic hoops; the lack of angles allowed the oscillating spectrum of low- and high-frequency waves to blanket the occupants uniformly. Only one landline-secure computer and phone gave them outside access. It was double the security and twenty times the size of the Automat. It was joked that if a government cabal were ever bent on overthrowing the federal government, it would take place in one of Washington’s most secure locations, such as this. Hence the name, referencing the Weathermen from the sevent
ies.

  They sat around a circular table perfectly proportioned to the room. There was a monitor set in the table, facing up, before each of the fourteen stations. The keyboards were rubber mats with pips.

  The reason for the meeting was a photograph. Phair had sent it to Kealey, and Kealey e-mailed it to Harper before instructing Phair to delete it.

  “Did he know how?” Schuyler asked.

  “Ryan walked him through it,” Harper said.

  Harper asked everyone to have a look at the image. It showed bodies on the floor or slumped in chairs, in no particular arrangement.

  “Off the top, Gail,” Harper said. “What do you think killed those monks?”

  “I can tell you what didn’t,” the petite woman replied, her voice rough from forty years of smoking and three years of screaming because she stopped. “As you probably noticed, there is no external trauma or blood and they apparently died where he found them, since there was no attempt to align them in some convenient way for moving or disposal.”

  “Asphyxiation?” Harper suggested.

  “The mouth is typically open in cases like that, as they die struggling for breath,” she said. “The fingers are often extended, an involuntary grasping reaction to the chest muscles expanding as the lungs attempt to inflate. Neither of those are apparent here. It looks like they died peacefully.”

  “Poison?”

  “Again, not likely,” she said. “The open water bottles on the table were set down, not overturned. Two had the tops screwed back on. Poison designed to kill acts immediately.”

  “So why bother?” Harper asked everyone. “A bullet would be as quick. Or a knife.”

  “Gunshots may have been heard by the MFO forces,” Nesmith pointed out. “Even silencers in a small room like that would have a loud, distinctive pop.”

  “Assuming the MFO bothered to listen,” Schuyler said.

  “True,” Nesmith agreed. “But professional killers would have assumed they were. As for knives, maybe someone had an aversion to stabbing monks. But these deaths do not suggest either.”

  “Why?” Harper asked.

  “If they’d been attacked, Phair would have found them praying or about to. This looks entirely unexpected.”

  “And instantaneous,” Platte added. The psychiatrist enlarged the one mouth that was facing the camera and ran an auto-enhance of the image. “But, you know, poison just doesn’t fit.”

  Harper was surprised by that. “Why?”

  “There is no distention of the tongue, discoloration of the lips, salivation, or any of the superficial indicators of poison. But there do appear to be thin, uneven, lightened strips in the flesh of their faces and hands.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Perspiration,” the psychiatrist replied. “They sweated against dusty skin, leaving trails.”

  “Maybe it was hot in the room,” Nesmith suggested. He was a short, thin man with a devil’s advocacy nature.

  “Possibly, but those water bottles are still pretty full. No,” she said. “I’m guessing those men were kept in there for some time—one of the men looks like he has two days’ growth of beard—and that they died feverish.”

  “What, locked up and forgotten like lepers in ancient Rome?” Nesmith asked.

  “No,” she said. “Infected. This may have been an execution or it could have been a test.”

  “A plague,” Harper said.

  The word hung ominously in the air, as if it were itself toxic. That was what Harper had feared when he saw the way the bodies seemed cut down.

  “It would be in keeping with the Moses motif,” Nesmith remarked.

  The mention of the prophet brought Harper back to what else the picture suggested, what he had asked Schuyler to research.

  “Paul, have you got something else?”

  The bald-headed man nodded. “The photograph shows seven monks,” he said, clearing his throat. “I checked with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in New York and they told me there should have been eight monks on duty. If one man is ill, another one serves.”

  “Meaning?”

  Schuyler held up a finger to ask for patience while he explained. “They forwarded profiles of the current staff at the monastery,” he continued. “I was able to pretty much identify everyone in Major Phair’s photographs. One person was missing, though—a Lev Kusturica, whom the archdiocese referred to as a passionate member of the monastery.”

  “A zealot?” Platte asked.

  “The word they used, the one written in his file, was ghazi, which is interesting,” Schuyler said. “It means a ‘fighter against infidels.’ But it is nonsectarian. He did not advocate his faith over another where those faiths intersected.”

  “Moses,” Harper said.

  “It’s possible. What I did was use his dossier photograph to search all the SIDs in the region,” he went on, typing keys.

  SIDs were Security Image Databases, repositories of video surveillance that were made available to international police and security groups for the purposes of employing facial-recognition software; the digital repositories are scanned for known criminals and suspected terrorists. These files were stored and accessible so they could be back-searched for new individuals who suddenly appeared on the intelligence radar. The idea was to trigger a police response in real time if individuals of interest showed up at a landmark or transportation hub.

  “By the way, Major Phair is in here,” Schuyler said.

  “We know that now,” Harper replied.

  “The monastery itself does not have security cameras on the interior, but they gave us access to the exterior recordings for the last six months.”

  “How long has the archdiocese been aware of a problem there?” Harper asked.

  “Not long,” Schuyler said. “They tried to contact the monastery after they saw the news reports of sniper fire. That was the beginning.”

  “That’s one reason we were able to get their cooperation so easily,” Nesmith added. “Never mind the staff they had at risk—the eight monks and the help that comes in from the village. With the library they have there, the church didn’t want anything to happen to that place.”

  “We turned up twenty-nine instances of Father Kusturica going outside the walls,”

  Schuyler went on, bringing up the images he had found. “Three times with the same man, whom we’ve identified as Col. Zeyad el-Masri of the MFO.”

  “Is it unusual that he should be there?” Harper asked. “The MFO has responsibility for that sector.”

  “El-Masri was out of uniform,” Schuyler said. “Why do that unless he was trying to conceal his identity?”

  “But he didn’t go inside,” Nesmith added. “We think that was so none of the other monks would identify him.”

  “Why would that matter?” Platte asked.

  “The monks are supposed to have limited interaction with outsiders,” Nesmith said. “It comes with the territory.”

  “But why an Egyptian MFO officer?” Harper thought aloud.

  “A test of some kind of military chemical or bio-agent?” Nesmith suggested. “Maybe one that went wrong?”

  “The MFO doesn’t store or deploy any of that, which would mean the involvement of the Egyptian military, or some international unit of which he was a part,” Harper said.

  “And that still doesn’t explain the napalm, the Staff, the whole prophet angle,” Platte said.

  “Look, I’ve got to let Ryan know about the toxin,” Harper said.

  “Before you do, Jon, there’s one thing more I found out,” Nesmith said. “Until he was transferred seven months ago, Colonel el-Masri was an officer in Task Force 777. They do store and deploy chemical and biological weapons for study purposes, in case they’re ever attacked.”

  He didn’t have to say more.

  “Is there any evidence that our contacts Samra and Adjo are in on this?” Harper asked.

  “There’s no evidence they’re not,” Nesmith replied.

  “I need to
let Kealey know,” Harper said.

  “I think you need to tell him something more,” Nesmith said. “Get the hell out of there.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  JEBEL MUSA, SINAI PENINSULA

  Still woozy from the tear gas, his muscles aching more than before from exertion, Adjo watched as Phair walked over.

  “How—?”

  “It’s a precaution I took when Iraqi insurgents were kidnapping and beheading foreigners,” the cleric told Adjo as he untied him. “In the videos, you could always see that they tied their captives’ hands against the small of their back. I wear my dog tags around my waist where they cannot be seen—and no one who does see them notices that one edge has been sharpened to a razor point. A little wriggling and it is within fingers’ reach.”

  “Very clever,” Adjo said. He was disturbed because his vision wasn’t clearing. After Phair had untied him, the young man tried to stand and found himself woozy. “You’d better go—I feel sick.”

  “Perhaps the gas,” Phair said.

  “Do you?”

  “No,” he said, “but you were closer than I.”

  Phair helped Adjo to his feet, but they didn’t stay planted on the ground. He felt a faint dizziness and was beginning to perspire.

  “You better leave me,” Adjo said.

  “God will help us,” Phair said. “Just put your arm around my shoulder.”

  “Not outside,” Adjo told him. “I need to get to a computer station—e-mail my superior.”

  “There was one in the back room,” Phair said. “I don’t think we should go there.”

  “The monks?”

  Phair nodded. “They may have been gassed or poisoned with an airborne toxin—I’ve seen that in Iraq. We should stay out of that room if at all possible.”

  “Was there a laptop?” Adjo asked. “Wireless?”

  “Good question,” Phair said. “You wait here—I’ll look.”

  Phair set Adjo back in the chair then went to the rear of the archives, looking first in the corner where the dish was located. He found a desk in a small workspace. There was a computer. He came back and retrieved Adjo, walking him to the keyboard. Phair set Adjo in a chair, then turned on the power strip. The computer whirred to life. Adjo shut his eyes and let his head fall back. He felt utterly drained.